"They remain ignorant of the enemy’s condition.
The result is cruel."
Sun Tzu's The Art of War 13:1:13-14
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Sun Tzu saw that success is based on comparisons. For Sun Tzu, competition means a comparison of opposing positions. Battles are won by positioning before they are fought. Good positions discourage others from attacking you and invite them to support you. Sun Tzu's system teaches us how to systematically build up our positions to win success in the easiest way possible.
Sun Tzu's book is one of the most valuable works in human history. It is also one of the most difficult to understand. Much of Sun Tzu's writing is based on concepts in traditional Chinese science and philosophy with which modern readers are unfamiliar. Simply reading an English translation of Sun Tzu gives you very little idea of his methods. There are a number of serious barriers that stand in the way of our understanding the text. Much of what it teaches is diametrically opposed to what we think we "know" about competition.
To get you started, we give you an idea what the book covers in this brief summary of its chapters. We then explain the work's underlying cultural context and roots in Chinese science, especially its methods of diagramming relationships.
Below is one of the 232 articles in our Sun Tzu's Rule Book. Each explains one aspect of Sun Tzu' science and a step-by-step process for using it. We offer a new article every day following our Rule Book's Outline.
"They remain ignorant of the enemy’s condition.
The result is cruel."
Sun Tzu's The Art of War 13:1:13-14
When learning the best practices in our competitive arena, trial and error is the slowest possible method of discovering what works. How-to books, like our own Rule Book, can give step-by-step descriptions and examples, but they are limited. The best sources about best practices are those who have been successful in a given competitive arena. We may think of those people as our competitors, but that is the wrong mindset. Most people shy away from learning their competitors' methods out of a misplaced sense of competition.
The world is filled with people who have practical experience in specific areas of skill. Many are willing to share their knowledge. The most important are those we might normally see as our competitors (1.3.1 Competitive Comparison). Strategy starts by mastering the best practices in any given competitive arena (7.2.1 Proven Methods). Those standards provide the basis for our strategic thinking. You wouldn’t be reading this article unless you were interested in developing new skills in the system of strategy based upon the history of others success. The best way to learn new skills is to develop relationships with people who already have those or know the systems that we want to learn (1.5.2. Group Methods).
| New to Sun Tzu? In translation, Sun Tzu's The Art of War reads like a collection of vague military aphorisms. In the original Chinese, it is a series of detailed competitive rules in the formulas of ancient Chinese science. The Warrior's Rule Book is an explanation of this system in today's terms of modern... More... |
| Outline of Warrior's Rules Articles The Institute collects, organizes, and explains Sun Tzu's Rules for winning in competition. Read more about our Rule Book here. This outline describes our articles on Sun Tzu's strategic principles. This outline follows the nine strategic skills that advances our positions: 1. understanding... More... |
| About Our Organization The Science of Strategy Institute (SOSI) teaches the use of Sun Tzu's principles in simple, everyday terms as a powerful system that anyone can use to become more successful. Starting with our award-winning books and audios, we have gone on the create a complete training system to help you master... More... |
| On-Line Training in Sun Tzu's Strategy The Institute's On-Line Training reprograms your decision-making reflexes to automatically make faster and better decisions. The core of our system is a challenge format which continually challenges you to make decisions and keeps track of your results as a measure of your level of skills... More... |
| Warrior Success in the Public Sphere The Art of War has a long history of creating winners, not only in the military, business, politics, and sports, but in virtually every other competitive arena. We have collected a few examples here from the public sphere, but also see the articles from our members who describe their... More... |
| Peter Drucker on Strategic Planning It is remarkable how the same lessons need to be rediscovered again and again. Sun Tzu dealt with the confusion between a warrior's adaptive strategy in dealing with competing people and long-term planning in dealing with objects. We are still dealing with it today. In this 1973 book, Management... More... |
| Linear Versus Adaptive Strategic Thinking There is a real difference between Sun Tzu's strategic methods and the deterministic planning model of problem solving. A useful way to describe this difference is to contrast the linear thinking of planning with the adaptive loop. Planning works with objects who cannot resist our plans. The... More... |